Written by

Charlotte Albers, Free Press Correspondent

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Students at Orchard Elementary School in South Burlington are providing an example of a gardening movement that’s catching on across the country.

They’re growing flowers and vegetables that beautify their campus grounds — but also deepen lesson plans through plant-based learning.

Presenters at the National Children and Youth Gardening Symposium, an annual event sponsored by The American Horticultural Society, share ideas and examples of how best to connect youngsters with plants, and many of the things happening at Orchard Elementary are being done by educators elsewhere.

This year marks the symposium’s 20th anniversary. Educators will come from across the United States to talk about recycling food waste, designing gardens for multi-age learning, and why unconstructed play in natural settings such as backyards, community parks and schools is critical to the development of healthy minds.

Orchard Elementary and many other schools in Vermont are working to build outdoor classrooms where nature takes center stage.

A sense of wonder

Carol McQuillen, a K-1 teacher at Orchard Elementary, remembers when she first got the urge to bring her students closer to nature.

The moment came at an event at Shelburne Farms about 10 years ago that celebrated the Earth Charter Initiative, a worldwide program that supports sustainable living practices.

“It changed my life,” she said, recalling the dancers who entered the historic Breeding Barn, the music of Paul Winter, and Satish Kumar, the environmental activist, who urged attendees to connect body, mind and spirit and find ways to help the Earth.

The experience motivated her to develop gardens and a program called Sustainable Living Initiatives Motivating Youth.

Since 2001, students have planted nine trees around the campus in South Burlington.

They’ve also developed growing zones where plants complement the curriculum, allowing students to experiment and gain valuable experience in working directly in the soil, growing food that is prepared for the school community’s harvest festival.

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Many classrooms are equipped with light stands and supplies including Vermont Organics potting soil, used to fill shallow trays or cell packs for seed starting.

Tools are kept in a storage shed and replenished with money from two tag sales held annually since 2003.

“It’s powerful to experiment with living things,” said Linda Waltien, who teaches second grade. “It seems impossible that a seed the size of a grain of salt has the power to grow into something like a carrot, which tastes crunchy and sweet.”

Second-graders at Orchard Elementary have a dedicated garden space. They’ve planted a Three Sisters Garden with corn, beans and rice while studying Native American cultures.

One year they sowed wildflowers and grasses and grew a tall grass prairie to replicate the ecosystems that once flourished across the country.

This year Waltien’s students are propagating root crops — beets, onions, parsnip, carrots and colorful varieties of potatoes — under a set of full-spectrum lights set up in the classroom.

Every color in the rainbow

When I visited the school recently, seed trays were bursting with life beneath full-spectrum lights in McQuillen’s classroom.

Ollie Clifford, 6, proudly showed off the tomatoes and beets he’d started in peat pots.

Other edibles under production included zucchini; bell peppers; Crimson Carmello, a medium slicing tomato popular with the kids; and a variety of Italian lettuce that is cut directly from the trays for Eat the Rainbow lunches.

The lunches are part of a curriculum program that promotes healthy eating habits by focusing on phytonutrients (nutrients that come from plants) and how food colors relate to different nutrients and vitamins.

Health-boosting Vitamin C is present in many underground crops, along with fruits and vegetables.

Along with seed starting, everyone makes an oversize journal for a study unit about the origins of food in Vermont. Graphs and charts mark taste tests from fall harvests of vegetables begun the previous spring.

The journals include instructions such as how to bake squash or pumpkin and feature recipes, some of which are taken home to share with families.

Blood-red beets — loaded with Vitamin A — are more palatable when roasted; their caramelized sweetness partners well with potatoes and sauteed kale.

“Up until a few years ago we served pies from Cotsco at our Harvest Festival,” McQuillen said. “Our students and teachers now grow, harvest and prepare a major portion of the dinner.”

Two interns from the University of Vermont’s department of plant and soil science teach about life science, food education and harvesting, and they’re on hand outdoors to oversee garden maintenance.

Community partners

When Sabrina Joy Milbury’s daughter Jaska was a fourth-grade student at Orchard Elementary in 1993, she got involved as a parent volunteer, helped develop gardens around the school, and shared her love of horticulture with Carol McQuillen and others.

It was a good partnership.

Milbury’s passion for plants caught on with the students, and she continued to be an active volunteer at the school for many years while she developed her own business, Just Dancing, a plant nursery in South Burlington that’s recently expanded to a new location at Isham Farm in Williston.

“All kids need the opportunity to be outside and make connections with classroom learning,” she said.

Over the years she’s supplied seeds and money for needed equipment and played an advisory role to teachers as a consulting horticulturist.

Transplants started at the Just Dancing greenhouse have been donated or sold at cost to fill out plots that are tended by the summer care program at the school.

Her daughter, now 28, is a farmer.

Getting her hands in the soil at an early age helped guide her path, Milbury believes.

She’s also helped run teacher trainings developed around Vermont state standards, developed with youth garden expert Joseph Keefer, co-founder of Foodworks in Montpelier.

“Eleven out of 22 teachers make connections to the gardens through life science and cultural history,” McQuillen said. “They’re promoting stewardship by helping children be the stewards of their school landscapes.”

The school’s library has a section dedicated to gardening and open to students, interns, teachers and parents.

“Stewardship opportunities for children and families should be in our homes, our schools, our neighborhoods,” McQuillen said.